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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

2211 XP-Aladocious

Maybe it's going to happen this
time. You know, the total meltdown of technological civilization. We've been
warned for years. Our systems are so vulnerable. Hack attacks. Monster brownouts.
Giant flares from the sun.

I had some giant flares and they
were the end of fashion civilization.

Remember the terrifying computer
threat at the beginning of the millennium? Windows ME.I mean Y2K. Civilization was going to end
because of the Year 2000 changeover in computers that only used 2 digits to
identify the year.

Old computers that were clunking
along on 640 kilobytes and didn't even have room to add the other two digits in
a 4-digit year. Just 99 instead of 1999. Come 2000 your computer was supposed
to think it was the year zero. And who could tell what would happen? The Magi
could have shown up pitching myrrh for all anyone knew.

As it turned out, not so much did.

So it is now with the death of XP.
All the news outlets are predicting the end of the world. ATMs across the
country run on XP. Financial institutions, stock trades, Mom and Pop chicken
and jo and Fosters Forty peddling convenience stores.

But maybe this time it is so.
Unsupported XP is hackable. There's also the Heartbleed bug vulnerability.
Heartbleed, sounds like a Liberal plot. But no, the SSL/TLS security channel is
compromised on computers and servers. Not just yours, your bank's and whoever
you do online business with. The solution, change all your passwords. But not yet,
because your providers all need to change theirs too or your new ones will get
compromised.

And this is really scary: The other
day here in Washington, even the 911 system crashed.